Political Crossfire Forums

Reason behind this post:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... -time-high
Government assistance continues to creep higher, but we cant just keep borrowing.
But whenever welfare reform comes up its always a fight between noble vs lazy poor.



So I wonder if anyone has a plan for saving an old friend of mine from high school.

He grew up lower middle class, his father worked groundskeeping at a local community college and his mother was some kind of secretary. Not wealthy, but not poor either.

During High School he worked fast food, I later started working at the same place. He was one year younger than me, but he couldnt make it to class in the morning and ended up dropping out of HS, he would probably blame this on the fast food job keeping him up late, but he stayed up later than that anyway.

But he got his GED and started college the same year I did, in the same first class.
I should mention here that his dad worked at that college, so his tuition was all but free, he had to pay something like $50 + books.
He still didnt show up. I drove to his house and woke him up to drag him to class, only to watch him sleep through class and then leave before his next class. I stopped after 2 weeks when he showed up on his own, showing he was capable of waking up on time, just unwilling.

This went on for a while, then he predictably dropped his classes before failing out.

He figured he would start up again next semester, but before that happened he met a girl, dropped his truck payment on his parents (they had co-signed) and moved to another town nearby.
He took out loans and went to school, this time a tech school for mechanics, a great idea...... if he had shown up for class.
He again dropped out, but not all was lost, he applied for and got a job working industrial labor, a high paying job that had stacked many in that town to a good middle class life. Can you guess what happened?
He did not show up several times during the first 3 months and they fired him.

He moved back to the town we went to high school in. Has been working at pizza hut ever since afaik.
I had seen a similar type of person interact with my brother. A mooch who would always be nearby when they needed something, always ready to avail themselves of your resources. So I quietly stopped interacting with him, the last time I saw him he drove 20 miles round trip to bum some cigarette money.
last I heard about him he was arrested for throwing fireworks off the top of the old middle school in the middle of the night with his pothead friends.

He drinks, he smokes, I know he has used marijuana frequently in the past, not sure about right now.


How do you save him?




I have worked for 10 years in food service and he is not unusual, maybe he had more options than most but all have had chances and failed. For instance a waitress I used to work with went to nursing school, as a single mother she was able to stop working almost entirely and live on grants. She quit, said it was too hard or she was too dumb or something.

You should probably just punish him incessantly, until he changes his behaviour.

In this way, successful people can continue to be successful.

Friends like that one nobody needs. You've wasted too much in time already by typing the OP.

Sounds like a f**k up. Oh well, his problem, not yours.

That guy doesn't want to be saved, forget him and move on.

As usual a con misses the point of welfare, income inequality, etc. Consider this a place marker until I get behind a computer.

Labour camps. The man sounds like a lazy bum. An insult to all hard drinking, heavy smoking, hard werking types the world over.

Seriously though, whilst the fact the safety net of family and state is absued by many (a fact the daily mail gleefully likes to point out whenever it runs out of other stories). From a policy point of view its next to impossible to distinguish between him and someone who's generally trying and is just legitimately unlucky.

i'm going to do this bullet point style to save verbage.


1. not everyone can have a job, not everyone can succeed, not everyone can drag themselves out of poverty. so what's YOUR response to that?
2. welfare is to cushion those who are on hard times, but it also has a much darker purpose that can be traced back to ancient egypt. welfare keeps the masses from getting uppity when things aren't going too well. food riots aren't some boogey man of history that suddenly stopped being relevant because we're "civilized" now.
2B. it is not the point of welfare (And i mean welfare as a blanket term) to save him. it is the point of welfare to keep him from being more of a burden than he is
3.why does he need saving? saving from what?